What is Systems Research?

A bit of philosophy

Information systems are tools designed to record, process, explore, or solve hard problems. Systems research pertains to pushing information technology to its limits in order to build the best tool possible to do work on the problem at hand. That problem might be drawn from business, science, engineering, medicine, or just about any other field. I consider my job to encompass systems research in its broadest sense: to develop basic building blocks, and the methodologies for combining them, to build information processing tools optimized for whatever work needs to be done.

Doing this effectively certainly requires maintaining a thorough understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the state-of-the-art in information technology. It is just as important, however, to develop a sufficient understanding of the discipline that the current problem lies within so that we don't overlook important details and subtleties. It is the job of the systems designer to bridge the gap between information technology and the particular needs of the other field. Information technology can be very agile and flexible, and we want to exploit this to build the right tool for the problem, rather than trying to find a way to recast the problem so that we can work on it with a tool we already have. Too often we try to bang on a problem with our trusty hammer, when what we really needed was a new screwdriver.

Systems research, therefore, is inherently multidisciplinary. While one can certainly become a specialist within systems research, my personal inclination is to thoroughly embrace its cross-disciplinary nature, taking more of a generalist approach. While one does need to dig in to the idiosyncracies of the current problem in order to design the most effective tool for the job, experience from an unrelated field can be very relevant. In fact, I believe that exposure to a multitude of disciplines enhances one's ability to see a problem from more than one perspective, stimulating creative thinking, and potentially leading to insights that may not otherwise be accessible. With an eye toward maximizing such synergies, I think it is critical in this line of work to seek out opportunities to learn something new.

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